Transport mechanisms for mobility support in optical slot switching-based next-generation mobile backhaul networks

We propose and evaluate several transport mechanisms to support User Element mobility at the optical layer in a next-generation (e.g., LTE-A) mobile backhaul network implemented using our previously proposed optical slot switching technology. We show with simulations that, with smart introduction of additional electronic processing for mobility traffic only (traffic of user elements that have moved from one cell to another), very strict latency constraints (sub-ms) can be met even for this mobility traffic.